Meet Furniture Artists

TRIP EUROPE'19, Philip Johnson, at that point 24, saw the steel and glass furniture planned by the German modeler Ludwig Mies van der Rohe out of the blue and turned into a moment hero of his work. Surely, it was Mr. Johnson who charged him to plan a flat in New York that turned into an exhibit in America for the European current style that remaining parts ubiquitous today.

Mr. Johnson discovered that Mies van der Rohe's squarish wooden tables and his cylindrical steel seats spoke to a look that was more slender and bolder than the more well known Art Deco style. With dim blue silk blinds on the window divider and straw tangling covering the floors, the flat had a downplayed polish that was bizarre for the time. ''It was Philip's quick comprehension of what Mies was endeavoring to accomplish that gotten him to fore America,'' said Terence Riley, the main caretaker of the branch of engineering and structure at the Museum of Modern Art.

Presently, after 67 years, five pieces made for Mr. Johnson's loft, on East 52d Street, will come available out of the blue when they are sold at Christie's in New York on April 12. Three are nickel-plated cylindrical steel furniture, called the MR arrangement: a footstool with another glass top and a cantilever seat and stool, with caned seats structured by Mies van der Rohe's associate Lilly Reich. There are additionally two rosewood tables with legs flush to the corners - the Mies structure that most likely enlivened the Parsons table. A 6th piece - a three-legged metal light with a cone-molded shade - came not from the loft but rather Mr. Johnson's noteworthy Glass House, which was worked in New Canaan, Conn., in 1949.

Christie's is unloading the furniture for Robert Melik Finkle, a Vermont planner, who had worked for Mr. Johnson for over a year in the late '50s. Whenever Mr. Finkle chose to finish his examinations at Yale University, Mr. Johnson gave him the pieces to outfit his flat in New Haven.

The furniture is unmistakably worn: the wood pieces have blurred, the metal surfaces are dulled and set, and the caned seats have obscured and look ratty. In any case, Nancy McClelland, an expert in twentieth-century furniture at Christie's, sees the furniture as essential in light of the fact that ''not very many early bits of current furniture get by with their unique completions.''